Creative Brief

Creative brief is the bridge between smart strategic thinking and great advertising and is a key tool with which media and account planners can unlock the creativity of people.

The main task of the creative brief is to inform and more importantly to inspire them. It must reduce all the information that has been gathered from the client, consumer research and other sources, and focus it to a single idea to create a sense of possibilities.

According to Jeff Goodby, the creative brief is equivalent of a fisherman’s guide, where a person shows you the best place to fish and has some ideas about the best flies to use. The guide does not fish, buts makes sure the fisherman has a enjoyable and successful time fishing.

 A creative brief should accomplish three main objectives:

• Give the creative team a realistic view of what their advertising needs to do and achieve.
• Give a clear understanding of the target audience.
• Gives a clear direction to the message which the target audience seems to be susceptible.

A creative briefing is a meeting where a planner or account person will outline the nature of the advertising problem for the creative team and start to suggest ways of solving it. The creative brief is a document that summaries the content of the meeting. However the lines between these terms are getting blurred and at times are used synonym.

Aspect of Creative Process:

The various aspects of a creative process in a Creative brief can be explained by a set of questions.

• Why are we advertising at all- The answer could be due to the client’s business situation and the problem that advertising needs to overcome.
• What is the advertising trying to achieve- This refers to the objectives of the advertisement. It must be realistic and it must be clear about the desired effects.
• Who are we talking to- This refers to a demographic description and defining the group that needs to be addressed and who needs to be excluded.
• What do we know about them- There should be an understanding of the target audience’s lives and minds.
• What’s the main idea to be communicated- This part of the brief is referred to as ‘proposition’. The idea must make the audience reconsider their views on existing or new product. The emphasis is on the message communicated to the audience.
• What’s the best way of planting the idea- This answers, what is referred to as ‘strategy’. Here it is decided on how the idea is to represented and executed.